The Big Bad started as a TV trope1 – an evil force that works to corrupt, defeat, eliminate the protagonist of the story – and has become a term of art in fiction writing as well. A Big Bad is not, necessarily, the nastiest or even primary villain of the piece, but could be the evil force that is using the nasty villain to achieve its nefarious ends. It can be human, it can be corporate, it can be political. It can be Cruella de Vil. Jeez, she scares me.

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The possibilities are endless. The Big Bad is essential. The Big Bad drives the plot.

As we’ve been plotting and scheming for the past few years on this series of novels, K. R. Brorman, S. A. Young and I have each created our own Big Bad to drive the plot of our respective books in the series, but this is a collaboration – all of our characters feature in all of the books, so we’ve also connected our Big Bads. This was something of a break-through in our most recent Retreat. We hammered out the threads (sorry to mix metaphors) that tie them and the books together. To tell you much more would be to offer spoilers so I’ll restrain myself.

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They are all a different kind of evil, but their enterprises overlap – touch each other in sinister ways – another way our stories weave together to form a fabric that we hope you’ll find captivating.

Gratuitous gif of one hot villain!

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1We’ve mentioned this before…the Big Bad was popularized in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Occasionally, characters would even refer to themselves as “the Big Bad”.